Dust

by Terri Pease | Dec 9, 2022 | flash fiction

There was a lot of dust on them mens. Me, keepin’ off the wooden sidewalk while keeping an eye, a close eye, mind, on them rowdy boys of Mist’ Showet, all I could see was dusty mens. They wasn’t wearin’ more than rags over they parts, and some not even that. In my head I was studying—to see could I get a half-spoiled bit of sugar to bring back to my pallet. Could maybe the fella what totes barrel for Boss Kerman in the store see somewhat had-a fell on the floor and sweep it up for “out back”. Could maybe put some in a little in a sack I could hide in my dress front. So I was thinkin’ about could I make a little sugar tit for my twins I couldn’t feed when he spat right in front of me, so’s I could see he was there. 

The coffle was stopped in the road, driver muttering with the dark ugly over one man on his knees on that road. He swinging his whip on that man, the blood running over his back making streaks in the dust from the quarry where he worked them. 

And the spit, landing at my feet is all made me look. 

And then I had to stop. I dropped to the dirt, not looking for more than a breath’s time, then reaching for my behind, to worry and scratch like I had some kind of flea on me.  I knew it was him, sent to the quarry so he and I would never so much as breathe air in the same place. All cause Master Showet wanted what he wanted.

Mama told me ‘fore I could smell myself good, don’t let no white folks see what you love.

 But I thought the wind in the trees stopped when Basie ran by that day. I’d been seeing him round the place my whole life, and he was just one more rusty-behind boy driving hogs and fetchin’ for the stable man. But that day when he came racing round that corner and shouting hog runnin’ move the chirrens, I took two babies by the arms and pushed them into the door of the nearest cabin, then looked and felt myself.  Under my arms started to prickle, and my hands went up there.  I watched his legs flash by, saw how he fell on that old hog and threw rope round one leg and its neck, so’s it had to follow where he took it or stop its own breath.

And after, anytime, just seeing how Basie could shout those animals to do anything he wanted, made my hands fly up under my arms, made me wish I was a little cow too, or a hog so he could fall on me.  And surely Mama called me heifer then. But I was seeing nothin’ and no one but Basie.

I sat in that street. Just scratching like I had nothin’ but fleas, so’s I could worry my dress up to my knees, let him see me, see I knew him, remember how on that one Sunday, sittin’ on the cabin stoop and spittin’ watermelon seeds,  I was laughin’ cause I was winnin’, and his fingers got near to my knees, then driver come up with some other hands. Good thing, he say, Master done told me keep my eyes on you, gal. 

Boy. Now he talking to Basie and got him pulled up, Basie shirt twisted round his neck, he almost on tippy toes, Boy, I know that stable need you, but we done just found out Boss Nolmann there need you down his quarry more.

And like that Basie was gone.

Basie’s Mama never so much as look at me again, ‘cause all the hands knew Master had to sell that big strong boy was gon’ be a main-hand cause him and me was gettin’ too friendly.  And Master had me to the backfield, to the curehouse that night, and load of nights after, and I had them babies done got sold soon as they weaned, a boy, another boy, and one I didn’t know what it was they took it from me so fast to feed on another place, or maybe just drowned it if it look too white. And I makes all my milk now for the babies in the big house.

But I got mine back.  I sat in that street just like a heifer and worried that flea ain’t really a flea and drug my dress up so Basie could see I knew he was in that quarry coffle, and that I knew how he had been smiling and spittin’ seeds, and they hadn’t killed him yet. And that he knew I loved him.

Coefficient

by Phillip Sterling | Dec 9, 2022 | flash fiction

The foam pillow, one of several retrieved from his parent’s house after the sale, smelled of Bengay. Meant for the guest bedroom, which his wife at the time redecorated in what she called “Victorian Chic”—an effort, under compromise, to both appropriate and purge the room of gothic memorabilia abandoned (at last!) by the youngest son of his first marriage—the pillow had been remaindered to the upper shelf of the closet, beside the  Comedy mask he’d been unable to part with (its mate, Tragedy, featured in the property settlement of the first divorce). When he slept with his head on the foam pillow, he dreamt of leaning back onto the vinyl seats of Mike’s ‘65 Pontiac Bonneville and drag racing along Grand View Parkway in Traverse City, Michigan, and of how Mike would remove the ring-buoy-sized air filter from the carburetor, convinced that it would help them go faster.

The feather pillow, one of two 100% Real Down pillows his second wife left behind, smelled of windowsills—moth dust and insect casings. It languished feebly on “her” side of the queen-sized maple cannonball bed they’d purchased to replace what she’d called “the bridal suite,” a double-sized frame (no headboard) that she’d asked him to donate to the Salvation Army. (“A way to reduce,” she said, “your thinking of anyone else when we screw.”) When he slept on the feather pillow, he dreamt that he was stranded and panicky in an airport in Europe—Brussels, maybe—because he couldn’t locate his nine suitcases, his four kids, his wife, or the bread he’d bought to go with the hard sausage and cheese they’d meant to smuggle back into the States and which was packed already in one of the suitcases the older kids had been instructed to supervise carefully, as packages left unattended would be scooped into what looked to be an industrial floor cleaner modified by a U.N. demolition team, taken out onto the tarmac, and exploded into inedible fragments of porc and Edam.

The other feather pillow (the “match”) anchored the couch in the family room. It smelled a little like the beer he’d spilled when he’d fallen asleep watching a Julia Roberts film—either from the VHS collection his first wife left behind or from the DVD collection his second wife added to—and a little like the fishy breath of the kitten he’d rescued from the county animal shelter (and named “Julia” and raised for nearly a year before its disappearance . . .). He doesn’t dream, when he falls asleep on that pillow. Or at least he doesn’t recall any dreams.

Now it’s summer again. And most nights he can be found in a sleeping bag in the yard, his pillow a rolled-up beach towel. The towel smells faintly of dune grass and coconut oil, though due to more pronounced odors of the neighborhood’s automobile exhaust and recently mown grass, it would be difficult for anyone besides him to smell it. He’s had the towel since college, off-white with a (faded) cartoonish figure of a pink cow laying in the sun, its udders exposed. Below the cow are the words: “Roast Beef.” For years he thought it was funny. When he sleeps with the towel beneath his head, he dreams of his first wife before she was his wife and of how warm her skin had seemed, how lightly damp, the first time she let him—led him—to touch her here, as if the stars would always be aligned just so, as if the source of the light that reached him was not already gone.

July 1964

by Cara Olexa | Dec 5, 2022 | flash fiction

In a blur, a blind of grass, the horse. Dunes. At your right, ocean collapsing on the edge of Virginia. The flea-bitten mare ahead, returning with her empty saddle. Here comes a horse: head bobbing, miff of sand from lifting hooves, to pause two strides off. The mare, watchful from a red-flecked cheek, and past her, up the beach, you see their horses stop and turn, Aunt Kate and Aunt Kate’s friend with Mikey on the lead behind her. A horse throws, threw, a girl, and she (you, the girl) lands in sand, thumff on her ass on the dune, tumbling. The mare looks at you, on your ass but upright. A girl is thrown but fine. Rolls, sits up, is fine. Miracles happen, every day. Did you think all those bedtime prayers were for naught? Bouncing off your bedroom ceiling? Here, now, on the beach, this is a miracle: three days and five hundred miles ago, you hid in the attic with pencils and waxed paper and traced from your horse book, appaloosas and thoroughbreds and palominos, sweating on dusty knees while the domestic tumult continued below, first floor, second, first, crashes and curses until the sunset in the attic window and you were thirsty and had to pee. Did you never think your prayers would be answered? Your selfish, jealous prayers—tell the truth, did you ever pray for Mom or Dad or the baby, or for Mikey, who’s only six? Tell the truth, you asked God for horses (but did you deserve them? Tell the truth, tell God you left Mikey downstairs while you hid in the attic, every time). That night an ambulance took Mom to Visit Gramma again, and when Mikey whispered Is Mom a drunk? you told him to shut up: You don’t even know what a drunk is, stupid. But this time God said Yes, and lifted you from Pittsburgh by the scruff of your neck. Dad woke you at dawn with a suitcase: Get your clothes on, Meredith. The end of Mom, not known but felt. Dad, dark against your brightening bedroom window, and Aunt Kate smoking in the doorway, ashing into a coffee mug because the ashtrays all broke. Shoes on, Mer, chop chop she said. Big adventure today. Is this what you wanted? You and Mikey climbed into Aunt Kate’s wondrous white Cadillac, but No, your dad’s not coming and No, the baby’s too little—but Don’t worry about the baby, Mer, she’s at your gramma’s (which makes sense, doesn’t it, because isn’t Mom At Gramma’s?). Yes, you prayed, good girl, but did you ever really believe? Now that God has picked you up and dropped you onto the haysilk back of a horse, maybe you will. In the dunes, the flea-bitten mare is watchful, but you’re small, sprawled, so she squares her nose to you to observe the surf. Did you believe in the ocean before you saw it? You knew about the ocean, from school, movies, television, but did you believe? Miracles defy explanation: why doesn’t the ocean run out of waves? Where do they come from? Down on the sand you see one wave, maybe half a dozen, but behind a wave comes a million million more, like this one. This one. This one. The mare lips dune grass. She threw you: you know it, but it happened so quickly you don’t believe it yet. You’re not crying yet. Aunt Kate’s friend points at you; you keep forgetting her name, but it’s her bed-and-breakfast, her flea-bitten mare. Fleabitten doesn’t mean fleas, she said when you insisted this horse is ugly. You wanted the chestnut, but Mikey got the chestnut, so she (the friend) told you that she (the horse) was famous once, won a race, but you were sure she was making it up. Now, Aunt Kate turns her bay gelding, trots down the beach toward you. You’re fine but a moment from now, when she says Mer, are you all right? and you try to tell her, you’ll start crying, tears all over your sandy face (red and ugly as your horse’s). But that hasn’t happened, yet. Right now, it’s still Now: here, now, you look up at what you wanted. A gauze-gray horse in a gauze sky. Ocean folding on a slim blade of shoreline. A horse walks toward you. Miracle: you believe. A horse walks toward you because you believe.

Luna

by Dawn Miller | Dec 1, 2022 | flash fiction

From her window seat on the train, Ruth watches the cluster of teenage boys on the platform. They posture in the dusk as a tall girl, black hair swinging in a high ponytail, draws near. As she skirts the group, their boldness swells, and the boys whoop and holler.

Ruth fumbles for a caramel along the bottom of her purse, removes the silvery foil, and pops it in her mouth, sucking hard to savour the sweetness as the girl fades in the distance. Once, Ruth starred in such a vignette.

A wide-shouldered fellow with a full, dark beard takes a seat across the aisle, facing her. He looks so like Thomas when they met a lifetime ago. Broad, powerful hands. Square-shaped nails. She concentrates on the view out the window, but his presence tugs on her, dragging her eyes back. She can almost feel the warmth of his palms against her face. The sharp, muskiness of sweat, moist lips kissing carpentry callouses.

Thomas.

Gone for two years. Each day longer than the one before. She’d prayed she’d go first. 

The bearded man’s eyes skim across her face—a glance, less than a whisper. Once his gaze would have lingered over her creamy skin and thick auburn hair tied back with a red velvet ribbon. Once he would have sought her gaze and smiled.

She crunches the last of the candy, sticky bits clinging between her dentures as the train shudders and lumbers forward. The man flashes a sharp look at her and shifts to stare out the window, arms crossed. Heat blooms up Ruth’s chest into her cheeks. He must think her a crazy old bat, gawking like that. She licks her sugary lips, dampening tender cracks resistant to beeswax and aloe, and focuses on the rushing trees and how the moonlight casts ghostly shadows across the landscape.

Thomas called her Luna—beautiful and mysterious as the moon. And now he is the moon, drifting through the heavens, while she is left, pinned to earth like a beetle squirming under glass.

Her children will be shocked at first. Horrified. The room they arranged at the nursing home looked nice enough on the tour. But it is tiny, and she has a lifetime of possessions. Sheila, her oldest, separated her belongings into categories: Give Away, Donate, Take-to-the-Dump, Keep—the size of the piles in ascending order. Like a set of Russian dolls, her world is shrinking.

“Mom told me I’d get the Hummels,” Sheila informed her younger brother, Charles, the last time they came. Poor Charles threw his hands up in the air, giving in as always, a born peacekeeper. Like his father.

Ruth witnessed the exchange from her easy chair. They thought she was engrossed in the fighting on Judge Judy, but she knew what was going on right under her nose. For a moment, she considered snatching the row of porcelain figurines from the display case and smashing them on the linoleum. Snapping the head off “Goose Girl,” making “Apple Tree Boy” plunge from the branches. Thomas bought the Hummels for her, each figure tied to a memory between them. They meant nothing to Sheila. Other than money.

After they left, Ruth took a permanent marker and wrote Sheila or Charles in shaky letters on the bottom of each figurine. Fifty-fifty. Otherwise, Sheila might scoop them all up.

Such a bitter thing to love your child, but not like her very much.

At the next stop, the bearded man disembarks. He stands on the platform, searching right and left. Go where your heart is, Ruth wants to shout. That’s what she’s doing. Writing the final act herself.

The train picks up speed and her heart leaps at the thought of seeing Thomas. She leans forward, willing the train to go faster. The full moon made her decision. Tonight is the perfect night.

Clutching her purse, she readies for the next stop—a sleepy town on the edge of the Saugeen River. Thomas caught many a trout in those waters swirling with hidden life. Many years ago, they attempted to swim there, but the current almost carried her away, and he’d wrapped his muscled arms around her, pulling her close.

She laces her palsied fingers together, bones fragile as a bird’s neck, and inspects the crescent moons at the base of each fingernail. Lunula. She whispers the word, her tongue kissing her palate with each syllable, the word ripe as a berry in her mouth.

She is water, bending to the pull of the moon. To the mystery ahead. To Thomas.

She will become Luna again.

The Extractions

by Kim Parko | Nov 30, 2022 | flash fiction

Agnes rocked us in her boat.

Cradled between waves, we were sleepy. She sang a song from her deepest throat:

A cup will fit perfectly into your mouth. A bowl and a spoon, too. A sun will release brilliance that you must not look at. But a moon will softly glow, will lift your eyes gently to her surface, will guide them to roam her pock-marked face. Agnes prepared us for the passage. She taught us to move through contractions. She taught us to open our fists and how to pull the abyss through our bodies to surface as tears. She summoned the strength of her great muscle to push us out.

The big animals roamed.

Agnes once told us that to kill them was to put a spear through our own bellies. We were mighty with weapons at our hips. Our women howled us to being, and it took us months to open our tight fists, and years longer to use our hands. After the big animals vanished, Agnes doused the cave fire and told us to inhale the smoke into our lungs. She told us to still our cough-wracked bodies on the floor. When the later ones came, they would remark that nowhere in the cave could they find our bones. Just the bones of the big animals covered in sediment with their charcoal outlines galloping the walls.

She woke to songbirds.

She didn’t know which ones; she had forgotten. But in memory, she saw their fins muscle to limbs and pull them to green shores. She saw them crawl through mosses and then gain speed through ferns and cycads as their keratin skin tubed to filaments. She watched them branch into feathers and lift from ancient ground. The birds in her trees sang a familiar song and she wondered what they knew about the end of things. Agnes thought of the empty feeders and the dry birdbaths in the yard. It was an early spring, thick with pollen, empty of bees. As Agnes listened to the singing, the sun fanned its first light from the other side of the mountains.

She drove through the signage asking her to want more, commanding an old hunger misunderstood by her new body.

She waited at stoplights, fiddled with her attention. She drove on. From her periphery, she saw trees blur— a green façade across clear-cut. She feared to drink from every oil-sheened body of water. She stopped here and there to collect a shell or stone or stick. She put them all in a pocket. Once home, she arranged the keepsakes in a circle on the table. She placed a bowl of filtered water in the center for an unknown thirst.

Agnes made a new doll for her daughter out of flesh and plastic.

She fed the doll plastic milk from her breast. She gave the doll tears from the ocean. Everything in the doll was fluid and salt. Membrane and tissue. Blood and plastic. The doll’s skin was another mouth. Her mouth was another ocean. Her food traveled the chain that linked to the sea. The weight of waves crushes plastic-like shells. Everything churned in the ocean is delivered to the shore. Agnes gave her daughter the doll. Her daughter kissed the doll’s cheek and asked her, How many grains of sand are there in the world?

Agnes’s branches came down.

What does she feel? wondered someone. Another did not wonder. Many did not wonder. She was too close to buildings; her roots were a threat to concrete slabs. That is how they built: on unwavering foundations. It was amazing the heights they had accomplished in a few decades. Agnes still had a couple of branches left at nightfall, and she let us weep into her roots through the dark. Morning brought her final dismemberment, and then she was gone in silence. We cried for days until the shimmering knowing of us released the last tear: a clear drop pulling light through its globe.

She said, In this darkness, be weak.

And, May you find weakness in your time of sorrow. And, I will give you weakness. She loosened our muscle cords until they were cobweb wisps. She took out our bones and piled them in a cairn by the river bend. She dissolved our tendons to mist. She disintegrated all of our cells with her molten breath. The wind blew us through the sky and pummeled us to the ground in downdrafts. Because we had no muscles, we met surfaces without resistance. Because our tendons were mist, we moved nothing. Because we had no bones, nothing broke in us.

The men told Agnes to describe the extraction.

She spoke with a quaver that rose from her waters swirling around absence. The men told her, Your body is now our home, and they moved in with their bright fires licking her walls. Agnes packed a suitcase with an assortment of worn shells and broken mollusks and a woolen cap. She stitched leather boots around her transparent feet. She wandered in and out of canyons walled by shattered bone and cooled lava. She came to the cave dogs who surrounded her in musk, licked her homeless body clean. Agnes thatched broken stems on the cave floor and browned grasses in the strong sun outside until their seeds came loose in the breeze. 

Trauma Becomes You

by Karen McKinnon | Nov 28, 2022 | flash fiction

It is my job to gag her. Mike and some of the others have her pinned to the ground. The rest are watching us. My hand is covering her wildly-moving mouth.  She is trying to bite me. This enrages me. I reach my other hand into my coat pocket feeling for the bandana, wondering how the thin strip of cloth is going to muffle the screams I know will come as soon as I relax the pressure of my hand.  “If you scream, we’ll kill you,” I say with my most menacing voice into her unblinking eyes.

I am eight or nine, not usually the lead neighborhood sociopath. I am the one who plays Barbie with the boy who stutters. I play jacks with the girl whose hand has been shriveled since birth. I don’t make fun of the kid who will forever talk in a squeaky girl-voice because his doctors slipped when they were removing his tonsils.

I know the rules. We are supposed to shun Sherrie because her parents weigh over 300 pounds apiece. I, alone, have been inside their house, tempted by extravagant ice cream sundaes and ancient Elvis records my parents do not have. I have seen Sherrie’s mother scream at her for leaving the screen door ajar, for crookedly parting her infrequently-washed hair. I know how damaged Sherrie is and why. Yet here I am, adding injury to injury.

Sherrie has a bad habit of trying to tag along. Usually, we ditch her. But today we’ve had enough of her whining. Now we have her tied to the fence in Mike’s backyard. She can see her house through the wood slats, see her father’s car pull into the driveway, see it getting dark. She knows she will be punished for staying out this late. We want her to be grounded. We leave her there to struggle free. We go home to our warm dinners.

It’s Halloween and I put on my cyclops mask and trick-or-treat with everyone until my pillowcase is black from dragging the candy haul around. I know I’m supposed to avoid Sherrie but they live next door and I’m alone and I alone know they’ll have the yummiest treats so I make one last stop. Sherrie’s yard is festooned with steaming cauldrons and scratchy brooms that catch the hem of my costume robe. I tear myself loose and knock on her door. Sherrie’s mom sees my mask and says, “You never looked better,” before thrusting a stuffed goody bag with a witch on it into my outstretched hand.

When I get home my mom looks me up and down and points me at the bathtub. I see myself, hideous in the mirror, and yank at my mask but it doesn’t come off and I can’t get any air and I feel myself dying and wake myself up.

My skates roll fast on the newly poured sidewalks, especially with my dog pulling me by the leash. He doesn’t know to avoid Sherrie and luckily he doesn’t stop when we pass her. But then my skate catches on her foot and I don’t let go and Silky scrapes me another several yards before tiring of dragging me. I look back and the blood-tracks from my skinned knees lead straight to Sherrie’s grin.

It’s a perfect windy day and we are trying to fly from our umbrellas. We hunt the neighborhood for a ladder so we can try from the roof. A crowd starts to form on the side of my house. Once we’re all roof-high, seeing the small boxes of our homes, our swing sets rusting in place, our parents’ unfulfilled landscape dreams, I understand that I am yearning for something outside this place, outside myself, and that catastrophe would be a welcome relief. Sherrie is begging to be let up the ladder. Mike whispers, “Our guinea pig is here” and shouts, “Let her up!” He pops open the biggest umbrella we have and hands it to her. We are all looking over the edge of the roof, gauging the likelihood of a soft landing on the patch of unmown grass. Sherrie holds the umbrella and watches us watching her. I see a hint of defiance on her face about the sacrifice she’s about to make and close my eyes, picturing her flying from my roof to hers and on down the line. And then I feel the jerky push and I am flying and the thrill of escape lasts just long enough.

Arcade Neophytes

by Sarah Matsui | Nov 21, 2022 | flash fiction

Mom and I got really into the arcade claw machine one elementary school summer.

Handful of tokens, a frappé from the neighboring cafe, ready. We aren’t even coffee drinkers.

Our eyes scan a sea of tightly packed yellow polyester lions with auburn manes.

“哪個?”

“That one.”

We speak different first languages, but I understand her question, and she can see which plush toy I’m pointing at.

This linguistic margin is bridgeable; it’s nothing compared to our contradicting visions for how daughters, mothers, ought to be:

“你怎麼變成那麼黑? 頭髮亂七八糟. 胖死掉.” How did you get to be so dark? Your hair is such a mess. So fat we could die.

No one else but her cares when I play in the sun or let my hair get wild. No one else calls me fat.

“這是你爸的錯.” This is your dad’s fault.

She was the one who chose to marry him.

“如果你是別人的女兒,我不管.” If you were someone else’s daughter, I wouldn’t care.

I had in fact, at various points, wished I were someone else’s daughter.

“我應該回台灣.” I should go back to Taiwan.

Sometimes, I didn’t understand why she didn’t move back to Taiwan.

“我的女兒不是我想像的女兒.” The daughter I have is not the daughter I wished for. “她不聽話.” She doesn’t listen.

None of my friends’ moms hit their daughters; none of my friends worry about taking care of their moms the way I do.

At the arcade though, that fifth grade summer, all this gets placed aside. Under the effulgent glow of this box, we scan the soft contours for what could come loose and fixate on the same shapes, together.

“Yeh!” she exclaims, deposits a small lion plushie in my hands.

We count two more tokens out.

We are a family that coupon clips for Top Ramen. Our clothes are from garage sales that we visit on weekends, rummaging through the discards of other peoples’ lives to build our own. Professional barbers cost money, so she once accidentally gave Richard a haircut that made him look like a skunk, buzzed straight down the middle. I watch her try on shiny size five-and-a-half shoes at Saks OFF 5th, and I watch her put them down.

It feels extravagant to spend money I’m not sure we have.

But Mom and I need more lion plushies.

Flossing

by Anita Lo | Nov 17, 2022 | flash fiction

Mom flosses me every night with my limbs starfished across the kitchen counter and my head hanging off the edge. She kneels over me with a spool of minted thread and works the string between my teeth. She says nothing used to come out of there, just berry skins and basil, and I would pop my mouth closed like a little coin purse. Nowadays, cheap rhinestones and cigarettes leap from my gums, and she wipes her hands on an old blue bath towel that’s growing green. Then she sends me to my room where I dream of having a cartoon smile, unbroken upper and lower strips of white for teeth.

For lunch, Mom packs me sliced fruit soaked in salt water so that it doesn’t brown, so that even when cut open for hours it looks fresh. It is just as pristine when I bring it home uneaten. Other kids buy lunch from the cafeteria: cheeseburgers frilled with greens, red-drowned spaghetti, juicy slices of pizza. Julia says it’s gross but I eat her crusts at the end of lunch hour, covering my face in leftover salt and oil. Those nights, the floss gets so greasy and orange that it barely stays wound around Mom’s fingers. She knots it around her thumbs so that it doesn’t slip away, and by the end the tips are purpled like sausages, which makes me so embarrassed for her, losing her grip and killing herself over it.

Julia and I collect little trophies from the classrooms: protractors and staplers and the history teacher’s glasses and the art teacher’s aprons. She hides them in her dad’s car and I pocket them in my mouth. Julia gives me the principal’s mousepad that Mom flosses from between my canines; I grab for it as she tries to toss it over her shoulder. I am almost as tall as her now, but what scares her back is my blood-lined gums.

Mom always says we need to be extra careful because girls in our family are born with only one set of teeth. That others have the option of a fresh start when their adult teeth push the baby teeth out of their cradles, but our family sold that right in order to board a ship and come here. “If girls here don’t like what they have, they pull out the tooth and start over,” she whispers to me while she flosses, a staple flecking her cheek. “But we only have one chance.”

That’s also why she won’t show me her teeth. “We had no floss when I was young,” she says. “They’re full of junk.” She covers her mouth with both hands when she laughs or smiles or shouts. Every time she tells the boat story, our family is at sea for longer and longer, and by now we’re adrift for years between basement apartments and restaurant attics before Mom says, “Finally, I had you.” I imagine Mom at the stern of a ship trying to work a bottle cap from between her molars with her tongue, fingers tight on the gunwale, ocean spray brining her lips.

“Do I floss?” says Julia, draining a can of Coca-Cola in one breath. “I mean, when the dentist makes me.” She crushes the can and hiss-laughs when the aluminum cuts her. I lick the blood off her palm and it’s thick, rich, the flavor of someone brave. I study the veins in the pale of our wrists and suspect that they look the same.

On weekends Mom hard-boils eggs or heats a bowl of fish congee for us to share. I can hardly sit through our sterile breakfast before running down the street to 7-Eleven where Julia is waiting in the car, M&M bags wedged between seat cushions, the school gym’s Exit sign lopsided in the rear window. This week she shows me how to slip bracelets into my bra at Claire’s and how to dine-and-dash, and my mouth grows heavy with jewels.

Mom buys extra boxes of floss now, bulk packs that should last years but that we go through in days, because she lashes me to the passenger seat when she picks me up after school, so I don’t run away, so that she can wiggle matchsticks of salted pear between my lips and floss me again before bed. My teeth snap at her fingers but I swear I am just trying to ask a question.

Over spring break, Julia and I are running from the mall cops, and I trip over a seam in the asphalt, knocking out my top right incisor. Mom finds me in the kitchen holding a towel-wrapped ice pack to my mouth. “Let me see,” she says, and moans when I show her the gap, and then the forlorn bloody pebble in my hand. She puts the lost tooth in milk and binds me to the kitchen counter.

That night, gently exploring the jellied wound with my tongue, I discover a needle of enamel poking through my gum. I wriggle free of the floss and wake Mom, whose cheeks are still lacquered with tears.

“New tooth,” I say, something golden ballooning in my chest. She presses her lips tighter and peers inside, but even she can’t miss the whitish nub barely crowning.

“It’s not possible,” she says, her eyes unfocused.

“You were lying, you’re always lying to me,” I scream. “I’m not like you!” She crumples to the counter and lets me run to my room unclean.

I wake up later that night to a light in the kitchen. Gums itching, head pounding, I discover Mom kneeling on the linoleum, a tangle of floss in her hands. “Come here,” she says, and this time she lies down, arms and legs spanning the counter as if she’s floating in water. She drops her jaw and tilts her head back, and I gasp at all the colors.

Pimiento Season

by Maria Alejandra Barrios | Nov 10, 2022 | flash fiction

When Mamá’s apron catches fire, my first reaction is to grab Mamá’s body and share the fire with her.

Pimientos en nogada is a dish that people eat in México at weddings and important occasions. Mamá is set on making it on our special day since she wants to prove to us, but mostly to herself, that despite her curled fingers and the ache in her knees, she can still cook. The night before the fire, she makes the nogada. She leaves the unpeeled nuts soaking with milk, mashes the nuts with fresh white cheese, a pinch of sugar, cinnamon, salt, and white wine. The mixture, after straining, is fragrant and creamy.

Mamá starts the dish with the fire, a set and steady flame that turns blue at the tips. She puts the pimientos on the stove. “How long on each side?” I ask, half looking at her and half looking at my phone. “You have to look to see,” she says, her bare hands turning the pimiento to the other side. Although they must be hot, she doesn’t say so. 

“Mamá!” I yell, far too late, as the fabric of her hand-painted apron she had bought in México D.F. gets consumed by the flame. 

Two days later, when we come back from the hospital, the nogada is still sitting on the table with the rest of the pimientos all over the floor, some blackened and some uncooked—the remnants of our kitchen incident, as Mamá would call it. Roberto, my soon-to-be husband, in the rush of paramedics and sirens, hadn’t put the food back in the fridge. I touch my stomach, which is covered in bandages, and think about flies.

Mamá, who rests in bed days after the incident, predicts that rain will appear mid-ceremony and soak us all. 

“Rain is a good omen,” I tell her, my fingers covered in the thick white odorless matter I use for her stomach burns.

“How did it feel for you?” she says, trying to sit up after I am done with her stomach. “I didn’t feel it,” I lie while carefully applying the salve to my middle, which is covered in purple blisters. “My skin must have been numb from the pain.”

She turns to the wall, smiling as if she were seeing it for the first time. A flash of the flames engulfing the carefully hand-painted flowers on her apron comes to my head. The same flames that traveled to my cotton shirt. 

 I had poured a pot of water on both of us. I can still hear the panic in her raspy smoker’s voice. The way that her voice addressed me in one word: “Corre,” her delirious tone convinced me that we could escape the flame. 

I removed the blackened apron and her shirt first, afraid that it would get stuck to her skin. My hands acted quickly as howls of pain escaped my mouth. 

“The wallpaper. It’s starting to crack,” Mamá says.

I nod without looking. Every night after the fire, the smell of our leathering gets stuck to my nose. 

Roberto, who comes to visit Mamá every day, swallowing his I-told-you-so about Mamá in the kitchen, Mamá at the stove, Mamá doing anything, is the first to be against the idea of postponing the wedding.

“I can’t wear the same dress,” I say, thinking about how the corsé will press against my skin.

“We will buy you another one.”

“My mother will not be able to go to the beach. Her skin could get infected.”

“So we marry here. Problem solved,” he says, sitting on the couch and putting his feet up on the table since Mamá is in her room and can’t move to tell him that he is not an animal and he is not in his own house.

I sit on his lap. Kissing his forehead, his cheeks, telling him not to press on my stomach—not now and not in the six months that it will take to heal. We start kissing, and for a while, we don’t check on Mamá, who after going to sleep, will miss the start of the rainy season that will stay long after the pimiento season is over and long after Roberto and I get married in the rain, my baggy wedding dress and his going out shoes soaked by the aguacero and the water that leaks from the top of the house, Mamá with her flimsy blue umbrella and with her water-resistant camera will take blurry pictures that will mark one of the first bad September storms.

When Mamá goes to sleep that night, I cover Mamá’s burns in the thick mixture. In the dark room, I hear Roberto calling for me.  The taxi is here, he says. I lift Mamá’s shirt. My fingers get lost in her tender skin.

By next September, our stomachs will burst in a sea of scars.

Pimiento Season first appeared in Moon City Review.